October Vagabonds eBook

BY RICHARD LE GALLIENNE

1911

I The Epitaph of Summer
II At Evening I Came to the Wood
III “Trespassers will be ...”
IV Salad and Moonshine
V The Green Friend
VI In the Wake of Summer
VII Maps and Farewells
VIII The American Bluebird and Its Song
IX Dutch Hollow
X Where They Sing from Morning
Till Night
XI Apple-Land
XII Orchards and a Line from Virgil
XIII Fellow Wayfarers
XIV The Old Lady of the Walnuts and Others
XV The Man at Dansville
XVI In which we Catch up with Summer
XVII Containing Valuable Statistics
XVIII A Dithyrambus of Buttermilk
XIX A Growl about American Country Hotels
XX Onions, Pigs and Hickory-nuts
XXI October Roses and a Young Girl’s
Face
XXII Concerning the Popular Taste in Scenery
and some Happy People
XXIII The Susquehanna
XXIV And Unexpectedly the Last

Envoi

CHAPTER I

THE EPITAPH OF SUMMER

As I started out from the farm with a basket of potatoes,
for our supper in the shack half a mile up the hillside,
where we had made our Summer camp, my eye fell on
a notice affixed to a gate-post, and, as I read it,
my heart sank—­sank as the sun was sinking
yonder with wistful glory behind the purple ridge.
I tore the paper from the gate-post and put it in
my pocket with a sigh.

“It is true, then,” I said to myself.
“We have got to admit it. I must show this
to Colin.”

Then I continued my way across the empty, close-gleaned
corn-field, across the railway track, and, plunging
into the orchard on the other side, where here and
there among the trees the torrents of apples were
being already caught in boxes by the thrifty husbandman,
began to breast the hill intersected with thickly
wooded watercourses.

High up somewhere amid the cloud of beeches and buttonwood
trees, our log cabin lay hid, in a gully made by the
little stream that filled our pails with a silver
trickle over a staircase of shelving rock, and up there
Colin was already busy with his skilled French cookery,
preparing our evening meal. The woods still made
a pompous show of leaves, but I knew it to be a hollow
sham, a mask of foliage soon to be stripped off by
equinoctial fury, a precarious stage-setting, ready
to be blown down at the first gusts from the north.
A forlorn bird here and there made a thin piping,
as it flitted homelessly amid the bleached long grasses,
and the frail silk of the milkweed pods came floating
along ghostlike on the evening breeze.

Yes! It was true. Summer was beginning to
pack up, the great stage-carpenter was about to change
the scene, and the great theatre was full of echoes
and sighs and sounds of farewell. Of course, we
had known it for some time, but had not had the heart
to admit it to each other, could not find courage
to say that one more golden Summer was at an end.
But the paper I had torn from the roadside left us
no further shred of illusion. There was an authoritative
announcement there was no blinking, a notice to quit
there was no gain-saying.